Monday, January 09, 2006

Disorientation & Flashbacks

I've been thinking a lot recently about perception, reality, also that dreaded philosophical word & discipline, existentialism. Reading a Granta special on psychology, psychiatry & other related subjects, I was struck by the meaningless of words such as "reality", "fact" & "commonsense". Whose reality? How do you establish & recognise a fact?For someone who has spent the first two decades of his adult life basing his beliefs, principles & actions on "uncontested" & "clear" facts, it's a step into unchartered territory.This preoccupation with such phenomena was intensified this evening while watching two widely different T.V programmes."The Root Of All Evil?", presented by Richard Dawkins, presented a characteristically cogent & direct critique of religious belief systems which deny the ability of science to help provide us with answers & solutions to age-old questions. I've been an atheist since my teenage years, so it continues to astonish me that ostensibly reasonable & sensible individuals should lurch into sudden sectarian tirades almost as some sort of default mode.The second programme was very much fiction. "Life On Mars" is a drama about a police detective who regresses in time from the present time to 1973 when he is struck by a car. What's happened to him? Is he in a coma? Is it a vivid dream induced by the coma? Is it reality, a clear fact that, somehow, he really has gone back in time?It gives a novel twist to the enlightened, secular view of history, which holds that it's something to learn lessons from, yet accepting that it has only partial relevance to the modern age.

About Me

It's difficult for me to pigeon-hole myself. Anyone involved in marketing or demographics would find that I've slipped through the net. I'm a maverick. I remain a philosophical marxist (note the adjective), although I'm the first to say that capitalism won that titanic war when the Berlin Wall came down. I have a very low threshold for bullshit, can be sarcastic & generally assume the worst in people (that way, anything else is a bonus).